ReeseAllen
Well-Known Member
I've recently been toying with the idea of doing lots of little 1-gallon test batches. Lots of SMASH brews and experimental stuff to expand my knowledge and get me started on coming up with my own recipes. I figure keeping things on such a small scale means I can do all-grain in my kitchen and do a complete brew session in 3 hours easily on any given weeknight with minimal cleanup.
I have this little lunchbox cooler. It came with the 10-gallon cooler that is now my MLT. I measured it tonight and it holds 1.2 gallons of water, 1.25 brimming. According to this MLT sizing thread, scaling down those numbers by a factor of (5/1.2)=4.17, this little cooler is just the right size for a MLT that's capable of doing 1-gallon batches. I can put up to 2.9 lbs of grain and 0.9 gallons of strike water into it, which is more than enough to do a 1-gallon version of most AG recipes I've seen.
Would it be worthwhile to make it into a mini-MLT for 1-gallon batches? Or is it going to lose too much heat (the walls are 15mm thick) to be effective? I've seen threads about doing small AG batches in the kitchen, using an ordinary kettle as the mash tun and suspending the grain in a bag. That seems like too much effort to try and actively control the mash temp. I'd rather just do the same procedure I do for 5-gallon batches: calculate my strike temperature, preheat the MLT, toss in the grain when it reaches strike temp, stir it up, close the lid and forget about it for an hour.
The cost of the MLT conversion is trivial so what I'm really looking for is advice as to whether this thing is going to work like I'm hoping it will.
I have this little lunchbox cooler. It came with the 10-gallon cooler that is now my MLT. I measured it tonight and it holds 1.2 gallons of water, 1.25 brimming. According to this MLT sizing thread, scaling down those numbers by a factor of (5/1.2)=4.17, this little cooler is just the right size for a MLT that's capable of doing 1-gallon batches. I can put up to 2.9 lbs of grain and 0.9 gallons of strike water into it, which is more than enough to do a 1-gallon version of most AG recipes I've seen.
Would it be worthwhile to make it into a mini-MLT for 1-gallon batches? Or is it going to lose too much heat (the walls are 15mm thick) to be effective? I've seen threads about doing small AG batches in the kitchen, using an ordinary kettle as the mash tun and suspending the grain in a bag. That seems like too much effort to try and actively control the mash temp. I'd rather just do the same procedure I do for 5-gallon batches: calculate my strike temperature, preheat the MLT, toss in the grain when it reaches strike temp, stir it up, close the lid and forget about it for an hour.
The cost of the MLT conversion is trivial so what I'm really looking for is advice as to whether this thing is going to work like I'm hoping it will.